Atlantic puffins face accelerating welfare challenges from climate change, including shifts in prey availability, increased storm frequency, and sea surface temperature changes that affect their critical pre-breeding foraging period.
Puffin welfare is directly affected by prey availability: chicks that do not receive adequate sand eels starve slowly over several days in the burrow, unable to call for rescue. The welfare significance is compounded by puffins' exceptionally strong parental investment - pairs work intensively to provision chicks with multiple sand eel loads daily. When sand eels disappear due to thermal changes in water column stratification, parent puffins make repeated unsuccessful foraging dives, accumulating their own energy deficit while failing to feed their chick. The combination of chick starvation and adult nutritional stress represents significant aggregate welfare harm at colony level. Wider climate change mitigation is the fundamental solution, but maintaining the protected seabird colony sites that provide disturbance-free nesting and advocating for sand eel fishery management represent achievable near-term welfare interventions.